Podcast Parlier

The speaker talks about their experience bouldering in Grayson Highlands and how they got involved in developing bouldering as a core sport in the park. They discuss meeting with park officials, presenting their case for bouldering, and forming a climber group to help sustain the activity. They also mention the creation of a guidebook for the bouldering areas in the park. with the gunks. But yeah, it looks it. Yeah, that's it. Shout out to your shoulders. But yeah, those, those are the two spots. But in the back of my mind, that'd be cool if there was a place that wasn't an hour and a half away from where I am. What about Grayson Highlands? I remember hiking around up there. Long story short, I started going up there and I was bouldering around there. I think James Litz and company a long time ago had done some like shadow bouldering around like the some shadowy like like ninja bouldering sneaking around tiptoeing around the outskirts of the park where there's very visible boulders yeah around there now they're called ADP boulders the dung yards some of those areas. Are we getting monsters on this? No. Really? That's in Black Saddles. That's ADP. If you're on if you're if you're listening to this and you want to know what these look like, go to Aaron's Instagram, which is probably in the Native Grade website. I'm assuming maybe something like that, or it definitely tagged on a great Instagram. And even more so if you want to know what lifestyles looks like. And or I know you have one short of a set is a different kind of area. That's not part of that area. Well, I feel like that was but it's not. It's not. Okay. Well, either way, I think there's a couple Grayson Highland boulders that are on the beautifully curated Native Grade website. There are. You can also go to Mountain Project and look at about 1,500 individual boulder problems that are painstakingly written down. There's also a guidebook if you want to buy that. You can pick up a guidebook too. But yeah, I was going up there and I went into the park and everyone was just really nice. And I went in there and started bouldering in the park. Yeah. And because I hadn't really gotten very far into the idea of reaching out and working with landowners and land management yet. I haven't really gotten into any of that. So a lot of this process inspired me to try and research and get deeper involved with those things because I think it's a really cool opportunity and probably the future of climbing at large. It depends on really good work and stewards. Yeah. So I think this really sparked it was because I got busted in the park in Grayson. Wow. It turned out to work out really well. But I was climbing on the Olympus boulder with Lance Getty Monster and Luz Cannon and Positari and all that good stuff. And the fellow that walked up was the chief law enforcement officer, Kevin Kelly, who still works with me. He's still doing that thing right now. And he's really the one that really solidified it. Marcy Holland, who's the park director right now, also really set everything in motion and did it all. But that day was Kevin. And Kevin walked around the corner while I was just like standing underneath. I was probably just like staring at the boulder like an idiot, trying to figure out how to... At the time it was Flying Spaghetti Monster and I was trying to figure out how to get to the top of that boulder and he walks around just like, what in the world are you doing? He sounded mad, but he wasn't at all. He was legitimately just confused at what I was doing. I was by myself. I'm sure I looked like a moron. I mean, I don't know what he thought. I was like, I'm trying to climb to the top of this boulder. And he was like, from this side? I was like, yeah. And he's like, how are you going to do that? And just started talking. And by the end of it, he was talking about all of these crazy, just super reckless, small stream, flooded stream creeks that he likes to open boat canoe down. He was just telling me these things. I'm like, yeah, man, well, I like to climb some sketchy boulders over here. And it just ended up him telling me other places in the park that had cool boulders that I hadn't even seen yet. Snowball, fast forward, I'm presenting to some of the board at Grayson Highlands State Park with some binders full of all the reasons why they should adopt bouldering as a core sport. And working on developing the climbing management plan there. Were you nervous when you pitched it? Yeah. Always like, well, can you give us like a tiny, because I feel like that's very different to me, that what it seems like traditionally the route for access to areas is, is people kind of go there and maybe they create like, there's several individuals maybe involved in after a period of time, because maybe there's no law or rule against it. Right. There just becomes like in a kind of a handshake agreement. Like, oh, you guys come here. And then maybe a CCC sort of situation happens. Right. Where you finally get in writing. Which would be cool. Yeah. Yeah. But you want like the more like kind of business shark tank sort of route. I didn't instigate it. You're like, all right, 12% equity, 100% boulder. So at that point, I was at Virginia Tech. I was in college at Virginia Tech studying natural resource conservation and park management. Yeah. I thought I was, that was going to be my track was like working in parks. And I was talking to a lot of the park management and Marcy was like, hey, it's come up where we're going to bring on a new activity. And we're thinking about doing like disc golf in the parks or thinking about doing some downhill mountain biking trails. And I was like, y'all don't, don't be mad at me that I think it'd be cool to have some downhill mountain biking too. Or boulder. And I was like, show me the time and place. I'll come and present why I'll represent bouldering. So I'll come, I'll come well armed, prepared, like I'll bring, I'll bring it all. So I showed up and I had like, at least one, probably two like binders to pass around that, that were like printed off stuff from like information from the access fund, all of these different things like talking about, I was actually studying recreational impact at that time. So I brought studies by, I think his last name's Marion. He has a lot of scholarly articles on like the impacts of like different forms of hiking. Yeah. I forget his first name. He has some really good materials. I brought like talking about just like the difference in physical impacts that you would need for like disc golf courses, downhill mountain biking, single track, or bouldering. And basically my argument was just like, look, you all don't have to build anything for this. Like it's here. Like the boulders, like a, you can't physically build what you have. Like, it's rare, like it's rare what you have. Yeah. You can't get a boulder field at any old park, but you can put in downhill at a lot of parks, but where you're unique right now, Grayson Highlands is that, or any boulder fields, you know? So that was kind of what I talked about. And I was also like, Hey, there's also like a bunch of people that'll just like come out of the book to build trails and do all this stuff for you. That's not going to cost you anything. So how long did they, how long until they were like, yeah, that's it. It wasn't long. And I'll tell you why. It wasn't because I'm really good at debate. No one else showed up. Right on. I had a captive audience in a way, but no, I still, I still like very much like presented it. Like there was the Friends of Grayson Highlands group that was there. There's a lot of like biologists, botanists, folks that are asked really, really good questions in terms of like biological impacts and the natural areas and how to mitigate that. And I didn't really have an answer except that I was like, I'll form, I'll try to form a climber group, a coalition to help sustain this. Was you done? Yeah. So we started, it was Southwest Virginia Climbers Coalition. It's now a Central Appalachia Climbers Coalition. Shout out CACC. Yeah. And, you know, we've had 10 years running now, but we've done the Grayson Highlands Bouldering and Stewardship Weekend. We built the first new trail in the park in over 20 years, like legitimate park trail. Yeah. So done a lot of really good. Reinforcing areas, like the Spaghetti Monster. I mean, like I've, I've never, I've hiked in Grayson Highlands. I've never personally climbed there and I'm hoping that we'll be really fun to go with you one day. Cause I'll be like, you know, the guide of all guides is having, you know, so what was just quickly making a guidebook? Yep. How many pages is that guidebook? Not that big. So we're working on the, actually working on the second edition to it now. It'll be about twice the size. The one that we have now, or the one that's out now is just like 350 pages. So 350 pages. Well, no, I'm sorry. That's a lie. 350 problems. So probably like 75 pages. It's not many pages. 75 pages, 350 problems documented. Just for anyone who's listening, just because I think one of the things that gets lost in translation a lot of times is there's a difference between developing a boulder and then developing a boulder and posting an Instagram with like a captivating caption describing the turmoil that you went through to send the climb and where it is. What took...